We used to have a tasklist item that read: "A free software package to run on a Palm Pilot in place of its usual software, doing more or less the usual jobs. (Linux, the kernel, has apparently been ported, but according to what we hear this port is not useful yet.)" In the mean time there are many different projects that have sprung up to write Free Software for palmtop computers. You might want to take a look at http://www.handhelds.org/ and contribute to one of the projects there.

We used to have a tasklist entry that said: "A program to recognize handwriting (we don't believe PocketLinux's handwriting capability is ready for non-PocketLinux environments, yet)." It turns out that the PocketLinux project is dead but there are people working on handwriting recognition (and gesture recognition) for PDA's; if you'd like to help please see http://www.handhelds.org:8080/wiki/HandwritingRecognition